Another growth area: elder fraud, said Steve Vallejo, a fraud expert with Bank of the West, who had logged decades as an FBI agent before joining the bank. Obvious demographic forces – the aging of the Baby Boomer population coupled with the fact that wealth tends to be greater in older groups – has fueled a big jump in elder fraud, said Vallejo.

Vallejo’s strong advice: financial institutions need to be very alert to possible elder fraud because this is a crime that gets more sophisticated.

Ori Bach, an expert with call center monitoring company NICE Systems, talked about call center fraud which is also on the rise. He pointed to well-publicized security meltdowns that started with call center fraud – using social engineering to get password info, for instance.

Bach stressed that in his view Knowledge Based Authentication – what is your high school mascot? – is thoroughly broken because websites such as Facebook have made that information publicly available.

He also said that Caller ID too is “broken,” because of the wide availability of spoofing tools that let a fraudster appear to be a known customer, but pinned that on what he said were untrained call center personnel who believe what they see on the Caller ID screen.

A sliver of encouraging news from the panel: more professional fraud fighters are doing more sharing with their peers, as they talk about emerging techniques of theft and also of mitigation. This increased investment is helping financial institutions better respond to fraud, said several panelists at the Monday afternoon session.